A Review on Object Manipulation Techniques in Virtual Environments and their Performance Metrics

Objective: The aim of this paper is to classify and characterize the existing interaction methods regarding object manipulation in virtual reality environment. Background: Over the past few decades, the field of virtual reality has gone through rapid advances and various virtual object manipulation techniques have been developed. However, an established classification of the existing object manipulation techniques does not seem available at this point. A systematic review of the advances during the past three decades and a classification of the existing object manipulation techniques based on it would help researchers prospect the future of human-machine interaction in virtual environments and further formulate future research directions for virtual object manipulation. Method: We collected and examined studies that are related to virtual reality and virtual object manipulation. The collected studies were reviewed in chronological order, and virtual object manipulation techniques were identified. Then, the existing virtual object manipulation techniques were sorted into categories according to similarities and each category was characterized. Additionally, this study reviewed the existing performance metrics for evaluating virtual object manipulation techniques. Application: This paper will aid in ameliorating the understanding of the existing virtual object manipulation techniques, and furthermore, offer directions to the future researchers in this field.